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No Problem! That’s Just Smoke!

The good news is I’m fine! Yeah, bet you love when I start posts that way. Um, we’ve got a minor issue around here. See the picture below? This is what the view from our backyard should look like on a usual day.

The View From Our Yard

See those funky looking rock things? Those are the Organ Mountains. We’ve a few miles from the base of the mountains.

Our Yard During the Abrams Fire

And this is what the view looked like yesterday. See something missing? Like mountains? Or maybe sky?

The Front Yard

That’s not clouds. That’s smoke! From as of Monday morning supposedly contained fire. A fire that started all the way in Texas. Saturday. That’s from my backyard. Which is not exactly in Texas. Last I checked we’re about 45 miles from Texas.

And the wind is supposedly only 50 miles an hour. Uh huh, that’s why the gauges read well over 50 miles an hour. Or why the El Paso station tweeted about the wind recorded over the pass? Yeah, 50 was a pipe dream. Like “If we hit 50 things will get better!” That’s why the neighbor’s tree looked like this:

Our Neighbor's Tree

From our front yard the scene looked like this:

Another Front Yard View

Yep, no strong winds and no smoke from the totally contained fire that’s crested the mountain range twice. Once over towards town. And then for good measure it went back towards the east side of the range. Because splitting up isn’t necessarily hard to do. Well, not if you’re a fire and wanna see what you’re missing on the other slope.

And what was the big story in our lovely town? Well, the El Paso stations talked about dirt in the air. (Really? Didn’t catch that looking west away from the fire.)

Towards the West & Away From the Fire

And our local Las Cruces paper? After some complaints, they covered the 100% contained burning out of control fire. Before that they were covering the local complaints about the county. What complaints? Well, the county decided we might need a few restrictions on burning. Like “DON’T BURN!” A lot of people around here were stating it wasn’t like a fire would start. All evidence to the contrary!

By the way, if a certain little me writes about a fire, it’s not my fault. Art mirrors life, right?